


Crisis Averted(?)

by CesarTheKing



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Accidental Superweapons, But sometimes you've gotta be a nerd to see a problem, Cat Noir is a nerd, Fridge Horror, Gen, Season 2 Spoilers (kinda), The Reverser, The mayor is a whole new level of incompetent, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 09:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15458502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CesarTheKing/pseuds/CesarTheKing
Summary: Picking up immediately after the events of The Reverser, Cat Noir feels like they overlooked something.  But when he figures it out, he learns just how horrifically bad at his job Mayor Bourgeois really is.One-shot because I was just so stunned by how terrifying the mayor's trash plan was in this episode.





	Crisis Averted(?)

“Thank you, Ladybug and Cat Noir.  You really keep this city clean!” Mayor Bourgeois said with a proud smile on his face. 

Adrien sighed in relief.  Reverser had been a tougher akuma than most.  It was one thing for him to take a blow from an akuma for his lady, but to have both of them under the effects of Reverser’s power was... well, he’d rather not repeat it.  Being a scaredy-cat was only marginally better than being mind-controlled. At least he could still remember what happened. He hoped that Ladybug wouldn’t think any less of him- being afraid of his own shadow was a little embarrassing.

He chuckled to himself as ladybug consoled the akuma victim, a guy their age who had apparently had a misunderstanding with Nathanael over.  She’s so kind to everyone, even to an akuma who had made her the clumsiest person he had ever met.

 _Well, second clumsiest,_ he thought to himself, _as amazing as my lady is, she’s no match for Marinette in that department._

“...but if you give each other a chance, I’m sure you can find out how well you work together.” Ladybug said to the two boys in front of her.  As they shook hands, seeming to have made friends, Adrien slid over to her side.

“A bit like you and me, m’lady,” he said, smiling.  She returned the smile, and held up her fist.

“Pound it!” they said in unison as Marc ( _that was the name Ladybug had called the akuma victim, right?_ ) and Nathanael walked away, discussing ideas for a project they would begin work on.  Mayor Bourgeois also started to walk off, tablet in hand, towards city hall. As he watched the mayor go, Adrien couldn’t help but feel there was still a loose string that hadn’t been accounted for…

“Excuse me, Mayor Bourgeois?” he called, getting the politician’s attention.

“Yes, Cat Noir?  Is there anything else I can do for Paris’ heroes?”

He was about to continue, but a familiar beeping from his and ladybug’s miraculous interrupted him. “I’m sorry, can we continue this later?  My lady needs to bug out, and I don’t want to reveal any of my nine lives just yet.”

“Certainly.  Just come by city hall and make an appointment with my secretary.  If I’m not there, feel free to stop by the hotel. My daughter tells me you’re such good friends, after all, so I’m sure she’d love to see you both as well.”  Out of the corner of his eye, Adrien noticed Ladybug cringe for a split second before putting on a less genuine smile than before. He just nodded, and, with a two-finger salute, he launched himself into the air towards the nearest rooftop.  He was about to begin making his way home, when a familiar whizzing behind him made him pause.

“Cat Noir, wait up!” Ladybug said as she landed on the same roof.  His miraculous beeped again- down to two paws now- as he turned around to face her.

“Yes, m’lady?   _Cat_ get enough of me?”

Ladybug sighed “That was forced and you know it.  Something bothering you kitty?”

Adrien frowned.  “Like I said, there’s something about today that doesn’t feel quite right.  Like, we saved the city and all, but it still feels like it’s in danger. My cat-sense is tingling.”

“Cat-sense?  Really?” she deadpanned.  Adrien shrugged.

“Maybe I could come up with a less plagiarizing name for it, but I’m being serious.  You know how cats and dogs know when there’s a disaster incoming before people do? Well, I’m getting that feeling, but I don’t know what from.”

Both of their miraculous’ beeped again- they had less than a minute left before they de-transformed.  “Shoot. Sorry to cut this short, kitty, but we’d better get going. Call me on my yo-yo if you think of what it is, okay?

“Absolutely, my lady.   _Cat-ch_ you later!” Adrien leapt off the building as Ladybug facepalmed.  He grinned to himself as he raced across the city. Even if she pretended to not like his puns, he knew she loved them deep down.

Adrien pole-vaulted through his window and landed on his couch right as his transformation faded.  “Geez, way to cut it close, kid!” Plagg said irritatedly before speeding over to the small pile of camembert that he had saved away for occasions like this- a “reward” for keeping the transformation up long enough for his chosen to get home after wasting time post-battle.

Adrien rolled his eyes as he walked over to his computer and pulled up the Ladyblog to look over the footage of their latest battle.  Something still felt wrong, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.

 

* * *

 

Three hours later, Mayor Bourgeois heard a knock on his office door.  Without waiting for an answer, Cat Noir burst in, startling the mayor and sending papers flying.

“Cat Noir!  I thought I told you to make an appointment with my secretary!  I’m a very busy man!”

Then the mayor got a look at Cat Noir.  He was holding a notebook and a laptop, as if he was about to present a book report for school.  The look on his face, however, was one of anger, mixed with a hint of fear, causing Mayor Bourgeois to blanch.

“Wh-what’s the matter?  What’s going on!” he demanded of the teenage superhero.

“Mayor André Bourgeois, you have two minutes to explain yourself.  Otherwise, Ladybug and I are going to go on TV and let the whole world know what you have done.”

Mayor Bourgeois looked perplexed. “What on earth are you talking about, boy?  Where is Ladybug?!”

“My Lady is very kind, but if she thinks that Paris is in danger, she will stop at nothing to save it.  Even if that means arresting the mayor of Paris on live TV. I’m here to give you one chance to explain yourself before I get her involved.”

The look on Cat Noir’s face was so intense the mayor began to feel a cold sweat start to form on his brow.  What had he done to provoke this? Did the boy know about the pension fund? He was considering leaping out of his office window when Cat Noir slammed the notebook down onto the mayor’s desk, sending papers flying everywhere.  

“Tell me, Mayor Bourgeois…” he set down the laptop and opened it to a symbol the mayor was very familiar with. “Why did you make a SUPERWEAPON?!”

The mayor blinked, dumbfounded at what he saw.

“The Space Dumpster Program?  What does that have to do with anything?  The city is safe from being buried in refuse, thanks to you and ladybug!  The akuma was defeated, the miraculous cure put them back where they should be, end of story!”

“Oh believe me, Mayor, I wish that were the end of the story.  But those containers are still up there in orbit, aren’t they?”

“Y-yes, as they should be!  What’s wrong with that? Our trash is kilometers away where it can’t pollute our fair city!”

“Yet, while under the akuma’s influence, you targeted Paris with those containers, bringing them down on top of us.  I saw the footage of your response to the protests.”

“Yes, those foolish protestors, why can’t they let me run the city in peace?” The mayor grumbled.  Cat Noir scowled.

“Oh, they were foolish alright.  For protesting the use of space as a landfill.  They completely missed the true danger.”

“What danger?  I told you, it’s perfectly safe, and it keeps our city clean!  What’s so bad about that?”

“Oh please, mayor!  Your science advisor _must_ have raised some objections to this whole project!”

“I don’t have a science advisor!”

At this, Cat Noir stood back, shocked.  “You… you don’t have a science advisor?”

“Of course not!  I don’t need eggheads second-guessing my decisions!  I’m the Mayor of Paris, I know what is best for the city!”

Cat Noir stared at the mayor, dumbfounded.  As he stood there, processing this revelation, the mayor began to look annoyed, and decided now was the time to turn the conversation in his favor.

“You may be a superhero, but you’re still a child!  I don’t know where you get these foolish accusations of superweapons, but I won’t have any of it!  Security!” he called, and a half dozen masked policemen rushed into the room, batons in hand. “Please escort our feline friend here out of the building!”

As the policemen began to surround Cat Noir, he ducked out of their way and extended his own baton.  Spinning it around on the floor, he knocked all of the officers to the ground and approached the mayor’s desk again.  The mayor cowered behind his office chair.

“You arrogant bastard!” the teen hero shouted, “You built and deployed a weapon that could destroy the whole city, without even bothering to consult any experts!  I have never even HEARD of incompetence like this! Just look at this!”

Furiously, he flung open the notebook he had brought with him.  It was full of calculations and equations, with a number at the bottom circled in thick, red ink.

“Now, since you were too STUPID to consult anyone beforehand, I guess I’ll have to break this down for you!  And you!” he swung his baton around the room threateningly at the policemen who were getting back on their feet, “You all listen up!  You’ll want to hear what I have to say for the mayor’s trial!”

“T-trial?” the mayor stammered, terrified of the leather-clad teenager.

“Mayor Bourgeois, you practically handed Hawkmoth- who, I remind you, your office declared a wanted terrorist- a weapon capable of leveling the entire city!  I ought to-”

“Cat Noir!  Stand down and explain yourself NOW!” before Cat Noir could turn around to see who was there, there was a whizzing sound as a yo-yo spun around him and pulled him to the ground.  Ladybug stood above him, staring at her partner with an intense expression he’d never seen directed at him, freezing him in place.

 _Oh, thank goodness!_ The mayor thought to himself as he peeked out from behind his chair and saw the other half of Paris’ dynamic duo.  He hadn’t noticed Ladybug’s arrival, and apparently neither had Cat Noir.

“M-my lady!  I was just-”  
  
“Scaring the mayor and the police half to death!  What’s gotten into you!?”

“You know how I said something was still wrong earlier?”  
  
“Yes, and you said you’d call me when you figured it out!”

“I wanted to be sure before I-”  
  
“Sure of what!?”

“I was just about to explain that!”

Ladybug sighed and let the yo-to go slack.  Cat Noir freed himself from the string and picked up the notebook again.  “Alright, kitty. Talk.”

Cat Noir cleared his throat and began.  “It all started earlier today while we were fighting Reverser.  Hawkmoth’s latest victim had hit Mayor Bourgeois with one of his paper airplanes, and so the mayor called down all his space dumpsters.  We saved the day and your miraculous cure put them back in space,” he opened the notebook and flipped to the page he had been showing the mayor.

“Now, I don’t mean to brag, but physics is one of my best subjects in school.  While I was a scaredy-cat I was terrified of those dumpsters actually hitting the city, so when I was back to being myself I followed a hunch-”

“Your cat-sense?”

“Yes, my cat-sense.  I was curious about what would have happened if any of them had actually hit the city.  I suspected it would do more than just bury us in garbage, but I didn’t expect what it would have actually done.

“Now, if my math is correct,” Cat Noir said, looking almost like a professor about to launch into a lecture- If he wasn’t so serious about this Ladybug might have giggled at his sudden shift in mannerism, “...those containers are 12 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters.  So each one holds roughly around 48 cubic meters of trash. Assuming that they are packed as densely as they possibly can be, and their contents are going to mostly be a mix of metal, plastic, and stone from construction sites, they would have a density of around 6-8 Tonnes per cubic meter.  It might be less, but it’s not exactly like you kept an inventory of what went into them, did you mayor?”

“I- uh…”

“Of course you didn’t.  Anyways, with a density like that, and seeing how they weren’t simply falling from orbit, but were being propelled towards the ground by rockets, they would be traveling at a velocity of about 10 kilometers per second.  They survive re-entry, like how they clearly were, and they strike paris with a force of around 1.37 times 10 to the 14th Joules.”

“Is… that a lot?” Ladybug said, unsure.  Physics was not her best subject, as she was often distracted by another blonde boy during lectures.

“Bugaboo, that’s 33 Kilotons of TNT.  That’s bigger than the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan in World War 2.  If there was an impact like that in paris…” he moved back over to the laptop and pulled up a map of the city that had several concentric circles superimposed on it, “it would leave a crater the size of the eiffel tower, and level everything from Le Cordon Bleu to the Arc de Triomphe.”

Cat Noir paused for a second to let that sink in.  Ladybug, Mayor Bourgeois, and the policemen (who had been very patient so far) gasped in horror.  Satisfied they understood the severity of the problem, he went in for the killing blow.

“And that’s just one container.  The mayor launched twenty of those things into space.  To keep paris clean.”

At this, everyone stared at the mayor, who had gone ghostly white.

“...Oh my god, we almost got nuked today,” said a very stunned policeman, speaking for the first time since he had been summoned.  Cat Noir gave a so-so gesture.

“Technically, it’s more of a Mass Driver.  There wouldn’t be any radioactive fallout, but the blast itself would do more than enough damage.”

The mayor, visibly shaken, got to his feet.

“I… I didn’t have any idea.  You have to believe me, I never thought of them like that!  Oh god, I created a superweapon!” before Cat Noir could say he’d told him so, the mayor turned to everyone present, “I am declaring our conversation a state secret.  I will be speaking to President Macron about this as soon as possible. Nobody is allowed to repeat what they just heard, do you understand?”

Ladybug recovered from her shock and glared at the mayor, now sharing the expression that her partner had been using throughout most of the conversation. “I don’t like this, Mayor Bourgeois.  How do we know we can trust you to do the right thing? And for that matter, what happens if Hawkmoth akumatizes you? We almost faced total obliteration today without realizing it because you were under an akuma’s influence!”

“What do you suggest, my lady?  Shall we arrest him and try him for crimes against France?”

Ladybug looked uncertain again.  “I don’t know, kitty. I don’t know if this is technically against the law or not,” she glanced over to the policemen, who gave her a noncommittal shrug, “But we certainly can’t take the chance of anybody using this to threaten Paris again.  Mayor Bourgeois?”

“Y-Yes, Ladybug?”

“Where is your tablet?”

The mayor began to scramble to his desk, opening drawer after drawer.  The heroes and policemen held their breath in anticipation. If he had lost it…

“Ah ha!  Here it is!” the mayor said, handing it to Ladybug.  She, in turn, handed it to Cat Noir.

“You know what to do.”

Cat Noir smiled.  “Cataclysm.” Dark power surged to the hand he was holding the tablet in, causing it to spark, then rust, then turn to ash before their eyes.

“There we go.  We’ll be having a chat with President Macron as well, to see what can be done about getting rid of those space dumpsters for good, but for now we can be sure Hawkmoth won’t be able to use them against Paris again,” Ladybug said, turning to go, “Good job, Kitty.  I would have never thought of that. Your cat-sense really came through.”

“What can I say, it helps to have a bit of extra-sensory _purr_ -ception now and then.” Cat Noir grinned, following her.  She smiled- the pun was welcome after such a heavy discussion.  As he was about to exit the room, he turned to the mayor one last time.

“It’s like you said, Mayor Bourgeois.  We really keep this city clean.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not the only one who was going over the numbers in my head after Reverser, right? Hopefully I did my math right here, and the impact simulators I used were accurate. If not, feel free to let me know just how wrong I was in the comments. I just wanted to get this out there because... holy cow the mayor really created weaponized garbage under the pretense of keeping the city clean. If he wasn't such an idiot, he could rival Hawkmoth for the role of Big Bad.


End file.
